The Wilderness Warrior - Douglas Brinkley [67]
But for a young man who’d already shot plovers in the Middle East (as well as the Adirondacks), and was the son of a New York millionaire, Shaler’s explanations about shifting tectonic plates and paleontology seemed dull; the professor might be a young Turk, but he had abandoned nature’s awesome drama, Roosevelt believed, by an overreliance on arcane theories about ancient dirt and meteorite rock. It was naive of Roosevelt to think that naturalists were buckskin-clad outdoorsmen like Audubon or Wilson, spending their lives in the wild. To Roosevelt, Shaler was a pedant who talked about how the mechanisms of evolution still needed to be ironed out instead of hitting the trail on a treasure hunt. Roosevelt wanted to learn about types of skunks, not faux erudition from a self-conscious Kentuckian struggling to become a prig, poor man. Theodore challenged his professor regularly, until they squared off one afternoon. “Now look here, Roosevelt, let me talk,” an exasperated Shaler stated. “I’m running this course.”30
Roosevelt whizzed his way through a slate of courses in the natural history department: Comparative Anatomy and Physiology of Vertebrates, Elementary Botany, Physical Geography and Meteorology, Geology, and Elementary and Advanced Zoology.31 And in truth, even though Roosevelt refused to give him any credit, Shaler was an inspirational teacher, known for taking students on geology field trips in the tradition of his mentor, Agassiz. Roosevelt, in fact, went on an excursion with Professor Shaler to study glacially formed cliffs. Nevertheless, Roosevelt, in a swipe at Shaler, lamented that Harvard’s president, Charles Eliot, had failed to hire a first-rate “faunal naturalist, the outdoor naturalist, and observer of nature.”32 Yet Eliot believed T.R. and Shaler were two peas-in-a-pod, regardless of intellectual differences.33 Likewise, Roosevelt would convey to Gifford Pinchot that no matter what their squabbles had been, Shaler, in fact, was “a very dear friend of mine.”34
Despite his apparent eccentricities, Theodore was popular with and respected by his classmates. Nobody ever questioned his bedrock honesty or inbred decency. Years later, Richard Welling—in an article in American Legion Monthly—revealed perhaps the strangest personality trait of Roosevelt at Harvard. Whenever Roosevelt was performing gymnastics indoors—doing somersaults, skipping rope, or doing pull-ups—he acted hesitant and clumsy. His caution and trepidation were evident. As Welling bluntly put it, Roosevelt was “verily a youth in the kindergarten stage of physical development.” But when Welling went ice-skating with Roosevelt at Fresh Pond—a kettle-hole lake that served as a reservoir for Cambridge—with the wind-chill factor around zero, the brutal cold would send everybody else home shivering, but Theodore would get an adrenaline rush, shouting, “Isn’t this bully!” He had no fear of frostbite or pneumonia.* This was unusual behavior. Welling realized his friend was overcompensating for something. Nature at its most brutal flipped some switch of fortitude in Roosevelt’s peculiar makeup. “Roosevelt had neither health or muscle,” Welling concluded. “But he had a superabundance of a third quality, vitality, and he seemed to realize that this nervous vitality had been given in order to help him get the other two things.”35
Detachment might be the best word to characterize Roosevelt’s measured indifference to Harvard in 1876 and 1877. Even though his grades were good, he didn’t buy into all of the traditional aspects of undergraduate life as one would have expected. Regularly he would send his father updates from Cambridge, describing in detail his asthma flare-ups and his prayer sessions at the local church. There were soirees at Chestnut Hill and Beacon Hill to report, usually with reassurances that his morals were intact, but his reportage from Harvard seemed contrived. It was his two touchstone